Marcus Alexander

MA, MBA

Marcus Alexander is a director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre. Marcus teaches on several executive education programmes at Ashridge, and his research and teaching interests focus on corporate-level strategy, the links between strategy and organisational design, and the use of outsourcing. He is the co-author of a recent book Strategy for the Corporate Level and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and other management publications.

Before joining Ashridge, Marcus worked in investment banking and in strategy consulting at the Boston Consulting Group in several countries. He serves on the boards of companies in three countries, is a Professor at the London Business School, and a Visiting Professor at the Vlerick Business School in Gent.

Marcus holds an MA with Congratulatory Double First class honours from Christ Church, Oxford, and an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School, where he was a Harkness Fellow and a Ford Scholar.

Publications

Almost all companies need a strategy at the corporate level that is in addition to the strategies for products or markets or business divisions. So this book is for any manager with responsibilities for multiple business divisions. It is also for any student, advisor or more junior manager who wants to understand the challenges that corporate managers face and how they make decisions.

Strategy for the Corporate Level: Where to Invest What to Cut Back How to Grow Organisations with Multiple Divisions. Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, Marcus Alexander and Michael Goold, ISBN: 978-1-118-81837-4, 416 pages, April 2014, Jossey-Bass

This paper provides a brief summary of what we at the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre believe we have learned about corporate strategy over the last ten years. It lays out the basis for our ideas about corporate parenting and the implications of parenting theory for management decisions. It is structured around nine propositions, each of which attempts to convey both what we have learned and why it matters. The paper concludes with our views about where future research priorities should lie.

While the core competence concept appealed powerfully to companies disillusioned with diversification, it did not offer any practical guidelines for developing corporate-level strategy. To fill the gap, the authors propose the parenting framework, with tools for answering two questions: Which business should a company own? What parenting approach will get the best performance from those businesses? To determine the fit between a parent and its businesses, corporate strategists should look at four areas: the critical success factors of the business, the parenting opportunities in the business, the characteristics of the parent, and the financial results. Next, to determine which businesses to keep and which to divest, they should rank them into five categories: those that fit well; those that fit in some ways; those that fit but have little potential; those with a p possibility of value destruction; and those that fit in parenting opportunities but not in critical success factors.